The Learning / Research Category

In today's contract lifecycle management (CLM) environment, the contract aspect gets all of the TLC while the lifecycle and management aspects often fall by the wayside. Enter Spend Matters analysts and SirionLabs with this complimentary research brief now available for download.

We've featured aspects of Daniel Kahneman's brilliant book, Thinking Fast and Slow, over a number of articles looking at his concepts such as Priming and Anchoring, and in particular what they (and other ideas he and others in the field have developed) mean for procurement professionals.

Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for Economics, with his collaborator Amos Tverksy — not bad going for two psychologists. And the work that led to the prize was largely around the area of risk, which is what we will look at today.

He and Tversky showed that the assumptions economists made about human behaviour — that we acted rationally in hard economic terms — could be proved false. That meant many of the standard economic models and theories were also flawed, which rather upset many in the economics community!

Kahneman called the strange beings who behaved in this perfectly rationally manner "econs" as opposed to "humans," who behaved — well, like humans do. And his work on risk shows exactly why the assumptions of rationality doesn't hold up. Our decisions aren’t rational — but driven by factors like the “endowment effect,” risk-aversion, and regret.

There is obviously a huge amount of detail that we could look at here — an entire Nobel Prize's worth, we might say. But we will just focus on a few key conclusions and a handful of implications for procurement. As before, we strongly recommend you read the book if this interests you (and, really, it should).

Contract lifecycle management (CLM) has its fair share of technology dedicated to it, but unfortunately not all of it addresses the comprehensive set of issues facing procurement professionals. In fact, much of the technology focuses too much on the contract while neglecting the lifecycle management aspect. In response, Spend Matters and SirionLabs have teamed up for Where Contract Lifecycle Management Technology Approaches Come up Short and How to Fix Them. This complimentary research brief is now available for download, and it provides a reimagining of CLM technology to drive engagement and value in your commercial relationships.

These days, the issue of cyberattacks features pretty prominently in public discourse, at least in the U.S. We speculate endlessly on whether Russia had interfered in the American presidential election. Why did C-SPAN suddenly start broadcasting RT? But this is all a long way of saying that cyberattacks are a hot topic. And it should be part of a company’s risk management agenda.

With the advent of Facebook and the digital camera, we realized that we don't look attractive doing a lot of things, whether that be snacking, dancing or just living. This can make us either avoid the camera or try to look better, and the latter is the approach you want when it comes to taking a candid shot of your accounts receivables. Spend Matters has a free downloadable white paper on how to assess and improve your A/R data.

The automation issue resonates within countless organizations across the globe — and if it doesn’t yet, it should — but AP organizations could especially benefit from automating and digitizing their processes. When it comes to finance and accounting, 47% of AP professionals consider manual data entry and inefficient processes their biggest challenge. But how should my AP organization even begin to automate and digitize? Easy — start thinking of it like riding a bicycle. Read on to find out how.

Spend Matters welcomes this guest post from Naseem Malik, managing partner at MRA Global Sourcing.
I recently had the opportunity to attend a Procurement Leaders forum where a renowned CPO shared his top four attributes that made him successful over the course of his four different CPO assignments with four different companies and industries.
It was straight talk that came across as authentic and highly informative on what this CPO learned and what his advice would be for the upcoming executives in the profession. He approached it from a top-down perspective, i.e. how to win support from top management to enable and ensure success as a CPO.
Without further ado, here are the top four pearls of wisdom shared by this CPO.

When it comes to the maturity of procurement organizations, it’s Spend Matters' belief the majority are at the foundational, or basic level. It’s not a bad place to be, at least when it comes to starting a true procurement transformation, as Jason Busch, Spend Matters founder and head of strategy, points out in the research paper “Reframing Maturity Models: Empirical Perspectives On Radically Improving Procurement Performance.” Yet these procurement organizations should aim to reach other industry peers that are fully integrating source-to-pay processes with the supply chain, accounts payable, finance and other departments and leveraging advanced technology suites, platforms and networks.

We are inundated by brands every day. Consciously or subconsciously, they inform our decisions and influence how we will act. Their inherent advantage is in creating a visceral, emotional connection with people, fostering loyalty and engagement. Although it may be a topic in vogue, it still begs the question, “Why should supply management professionals invest time into developing a personal brand?” The answer is simple: because branding works.

The question “What is services procurement?” may seem like a dumb question to many. But we would argue that it is an important question for the procurement community to ask itself. However, in this process, another set of questions arises: Is the current state of affairs adequate/acceptable, or should procurement be striving to bring the broad concept of services under a unified perspective? What would be the reasons for doing so? What would be involved? This Plus post aims to tackle all these questions and provide insight into the services procurement world.

We were recently asked the question: "If you were advising sourcing and supplier management professionals in the manufacturing industry, what external data sources would you suggest they look at acquiring and integrating into their tools and processes?” While we could write a book on the subject, we’ll keep our answer short and sweet today, exploring 3 areas.